basis," Honoria?' Grace inquired. 'Are you implying some kind of a final
socialistic state which calls for an omniscient Distributor of Goods who
shall know how much each man can vitalize?'
'Really, Grace, I am not a fool, even when I am evolving a reformed
society!' returned Honoria promptly. 'Most conceptions of an improved
state demand God for their Chief Executive and an enormous force of
government officials with the fine honor which, thus far, has only been
developed in human nature by conditions entirely different from those
the visionaries are forecasting. Unquestionably we have fallen into the
habit of thinking that if we only pass a law, any wrong at which we aim
is regulated. In fact, however, so long as that law only expresses the
practice of a minority, its enforcement will be evaded. Legislation
without character is as helpless as a motor without fuel,--and my little
reform, like every other effective change, must proceed from within
outward.
'So I believe that if I wish to live in a world where nobody has more
food, clothes, houses, wealth, power, than he can make significant and
vital use of, it is up to me to remake my own life on that basis first.
I am, if not the only woman whom I can reform, at least the most
suitable subject for my experimentation. And I admit that I have too
many possessions. Sometimes I am ridden to exhaustion by the care of my
"things," modest as they are when compared to the goods of my
neighbors. I know that if thousands of people did not feel as I do, the
"simple life" slogan would never have acquired the popularity it had
some years ago. We no longer hear much of the simple life, but we need
it increasingly. Personally, I am persuaded that the method I am trying
to set forth is workable.
'Why shouldn't a human being, seeking to get the most out of life, take
lessons from the husbandman seeking to get the richest returns from the
soil? It used to be thought that to cultivate many acres superficially
was the way to feed the world and enrich the farmer. But the study of
the soil as a science has taught us that we must resort, instead, to the
intensive farming which gives greater returns from reduced acreage. What
is true of the returns earth makes to our granaries, is true of the
returns life makes to our spirits. We need a science of intensive living
that we may get the larger crop from the smaller field. It will be
worked out by women, and it must begin in their domain, which still is,
in spite of the sociologists, the home.'
'The Norwegian maid who cared for my rooms at the hotel last winter had
figured out something of the sort for herself,' said Grace. 'After I had
put a few bits of things about, she said to me, "I like dis room. It
looks like Norway. Dere iss more moneys in America, but in Norway t'ings
iss more pretty. Even de kitchen iss good to see. Dere iss shelves an'
copper cooking-dishes all shiny, all so happy-looking. I like dem way
best. It iss better not so much moneys to haf, but to be more happy wit'
one's t'ings!"'
'That is the doctrine in a nutshell! In its poorer, more restricted
days, the world learned that secret of the art of living, and it still
lingers in corners that our blatant, crashing "civilization" passes
by--so that a Norwegian peasant's daughter may know far more than an
American girl "who has always had everything" about the priceless secret
of being "happy wit' one's t'ings." It is the richest knowledge a woman
can possess.'
'What is the real rock-bottom reason why people go on piling up money
after they have enough?' Martha demanded.
'I imagine,' said Honoria, 'that excessive accumulation is a form of
egotism. Now, if public opinion, the race-ideal, or what you please,
once demanded that we vitalize all our possessions; if it were once
admitted to be unspeakably gross to demand more property than we can
animate, as gross as it now is to over-eat, then the stress upon
possession would be transferred at once from "How much" to "How," and
large possessions would really become what some of the undistinguished
rich now fondly imagine them to be--a direct and sensitive register of
the finer qualities.'
Martha suddenly and irresistibly chuckled.
'I have a story for you, Honoria,' she said. 'A lot of ranchers over
there,' she vaguely gestured toward the southwest across the hills,
'have grown suddenly rich, raising sugar beets, and have bought
motor-cars and other paraphernalia proper to their improved condition.
One of them was heard to say, "I b'lieve these college graduates that
teach school 'round here really think they're as good as us rich folks."
That is the real attitude of your "undistinguished rich" toward the
gifts of culture and the finer qualities!'
'Honoria,' said Grace, 'haven't the sages always said, "Give me neither
poverty nor riches"? Why should your propaganda succeed where Job and
Socrates have failed? Job lived a long while ago! If the race were going
to be converted to his view, the process ought to be more advanced. You
will need very strong arguments for your doctrine of limitations.'
'Arguments are to be had for the picking up,' returned Honoria. 'What
kind will you have? Reasonable limitation on the material side always
brings some amazing flowering of mind or spirit like the blossoming of a
root-bound plant. If you want a racial argument, consider the Irish--the
poorest people in Europe and _therefore_ the richest in spirit. Poverty
forced them to concentrate their attention upon their neighbors; there
resulted an astonishing increase in sympathy, wit, and general
humanness.--If you want an argument from Art, consider the Middle Ages.
Peering out of a narrow world, hemmed in by ignorance and squalor, the
mediæval artist caught sight of beauty and immediately loved it with
such fervent, personal passion that everything he made in its image was
vital and wonderful. As his world broadened in the Renaissance, much of
his art grew florid and meaningless, lacking that marvelous, intimate
quality of the earlier, restricted day.--If you want an argument from
literary material, there's the _Picciola_ of Saintine. You can make an
imperishable literary masterpiece out of a convict's love for a tiny
plant struggling up between two stones in a prison-yard, but you cannot
make men listen to tales of great possessions. The interest in Monte
Cristo centres upon the process of _acquirement_, and it is the same in
any successful money-romance. Midas is only fit to point a moral, never
to adorn a tale.--If you want an argument from philology, consider that
the diminutives in every language show the lesser thing to be the dearer
thing, always. Remember Marie Antoinette and the Little Trianon!
Consider the increasing specialization in science--science which always
falls on its feet! I know a thousand arguments! The thing I am in need
of is converts!'
'If you could get them,' said Martha, 'there might really be a Woman's
Reformation, only it would begin at home instead of at the polls.'
'What other permanent thing is there in life but the hearthstone?
Nations rise and fall, laws and institutions come and go--but that
remains, the one fixed point in human society. I take it, therefore, it
is the one point from which the lever can successfully be brought to
bear on human society. If anything is to be moved or altered, the force
must be applied there.'
'But human society _has_ changed, Honoria,' urged Grace. 'Look at all
our new powers and possessions! Steam and electricity have remade the
world, and we are not yet adjusted to the alteration. No generation ever
lived under our conditions; thus we have no traditions for handling our
new environment. No heritage of ancestral wisdom tells us what of the
hundreds of new opportunities to accept, what to reject. Save in so far
as we are thinking beings--and that is not very far--we are as much at
the mercy of our desires as babies in a toy-shop, grabbing now this and
now that, heaping up a lapful of futilities and calling it a life.'
'Yes. But why should we make steam and electricity serve our greed only?
Why use them chiefly to darken the world and make life a horror? Dare
you affirm that we women and our demands are not at the very centre of
the tragic tangle of modern living? Isn't all this horrible speeding-up
of business largely an outgrowth of our exactions? What do men do
business for, anyhow, except to get us what we want! Homes are to other
material possessions what souls are to the bodies--the centre from which
the life moves outward. If there is no greed in the home, is there not
bound to be less greed in the offices?'
'I'm not so sure, Honoria,' Grace returned. 'No amount of intensiveness
in the home would eliminate man's love of power for its own sake.'
'Perhaps. Yet isn't the lust for power a secondary development? We begin
by being greedy because we want things; we keep on after we have more
things than we know what to do with, because greed has created the
power-lust. It is the aftermath from that ugly root. If the pressure the
home puts on the man for money were suddenly slackened all along the
line, above the point of poverty, might not the matter of unseemly
accumulations correct itself? If we women of the more favored classes
avowedly undertook to give quality to our belongings, instead of
demanding belongings which we hope will confer quality upon us, there
would surely be both a lessening in the stress of life and an
improvement in its texture. I can think of nothing else but the Golden
Rule that would help to solve so many menacing problems, such as the
high cost of living, the commercialization of life, and the divorce
problem. Oh, it would be very far-reaching, that attitude, if we could
only achieve it!'
'Why wouldn't plain Christianity do all your reforming, and do it
better?' demanded Martha abruptly.
'Assuredly it would--if Christianity were more generally a condition
instead of a theory among us. I wouldn't undertake to say off-hand why
the sanctions of common sense seem more precious to the present
generation than the sanctions of religion, when in so many points they
are identical, but I must conform my theorizings to the fact. Yet with
all our neglect of religion the traditions of the spirit have not
changed! They are the same from everlasting to everlasting. And one of
the things the nineteenth century most wonderfully made clear was that
the evolution of the spirit is the thing Nature has been seeking for
hundreds of millions of years. I don't suppose that age-long process
with the tremendous impetus of all creation behind it is really going to
be upset by the turmoil of one materialistic generation. But I do
believe that if we go with the current of materialism, we and all our
works shall be tossed aside as refuse, thrown into Nature's garbage-can.
I tell you, I can't bear the disgrace of it.'
'Honoria, you almost persuade me to be intensive,' said Grace, 'but I am
not reconciled to the doctrine at one point--the question of beauty. I
admit that one cannot vitalize a lot of senseless luxury. I admit, too,
that comfort and a certain amount of beauty can always be successfully
domesticated and charged with personality, as you phrase it, and that
the result is completely satisfying. But is one never to indulge one's
self in _all the beauty money will buy_, never to have everything of an
absolute perfection? You are against great houses, but there is Mountly
House, at home. It is big, but so beautiful that you are at home in it
all over. What of it, and others like it?'
'Big and beautiful it is, but it is on my side of the argument, none the
less. If you remember, the architect was also the decorator. It is the
triumph of his imagination. He designed it as a background for a woman
of opulent beauty and domestic tastes. He ransacked Europe for the
furnishings, tapestries, all sorts of exquisite, ancient things. He was
a great artist and he created a work of art. The family fit into the
picture more or less awkwardly. It is his house, not theirs at all. And
I truly believe that the ultimate purpose of our houses excludes our
going up and down another's stairs.
'Yet I believe in all the beauty one can vitalize. It is essentially
wholesome. It does not lend itself to morbid demands. The collector's
passion looks like greed, and doubtless for a time it is greed. But,
sooner or later, Too-Much sickens them. Their adorable possessions teach
them there is profanation in having more wonderful things than they can
enter into personal relation with. Therefore the inevitable end of all
overgrown collections is the museum or the auction-room. I have seen it
too often not to know it is true!--If you want a perfect illustration of
this in literature read Mrs. Wharton's _The Daunt Diana_. It cuts down
like a knife to the essential fact that our relations with beauty must
be limited enough to have the personal quality. And--don't you
see?--this automatic destruction of greed that beauty finally teaches to
the collector, is the same automatic destruction of it that I dare think
intensive living in our homes might bring to all greed. It is a proof of
the theory on another plane.'
'I think one might own a Mountly House without greed,' persisted Grace
wistfully. 'Having no house at all, I naturally refuse to think of
myself as ending my days in any less perfect domicile. What do you mean
by the "ultimate purpose" of our houses?'
'Ah! that,' said Honoria, with a quick indrawing of her breath, 'is the
very core of all my thought, and I don't know how to make you see it!'
She rose abruptly and walked to the end of the veranda. She stood there
a while, looking across at the spreading gables of her own brown
bungalow, with the yearning on her face that only house-mothers know.
Yonder was her home. Set on a mighty shoulder of the earth, facing the
sunset and the sea, it clung to the soil as the brown rocks cling.
Behind it were the mighty Sierras with their crests of snow; before it,
the sweetest land God ever smiled upon; within it, all the treasures of
her eyes, her mind, her heart. Just as it stood there in the February
sun, it was an abode compact of love, of aspiration, of desire. The
ancient love of man for his shelter had gone into it, and the love of
woman for the place of her appointed suffering. Desire for beauty and
hope of peace were in its making. Its walls had heard the birth-cries;
her children had played about its doors; out from it had been borne her
dead. Inconsiderable speck on the vast hill-shoulder that it was, it
could defy time and the elements, even as she defied them, for she had
given it of her own immortality.
'I have not yet said it all,' she said a little thickly. 'It is hard to
say, even to you. I have found an attitude of mind, a path, a way of
life I call intensive, for lack of a better name, and I believe in it,
not only because it increases my sane satisfaction in living, but also
because it finally leads _out_--out of all this tangle of our material
lives, into the eternal spaces.
'I see the world of men's business activities chiefly as a place of
wrath and greed, and yet even the most grasping must be blindly seeking
through their greed an ultimate satisfaction--not more houses or more
automobiles, or railroads, or mines, or even power, but something dimly
apprehended as beyond all these and more than they--something that is
good and that _endures_. For we all want the Enduring Thing. One man
sees it here, another there. As for me, I see it in my house. I tell
you, the Greeks and Romans did not make a religion of the hearthstone;
they merely recognized the religion that the hearthstone _is_. Under
that quiet roof I have learned that it is a woman's business to take
stones and make them bread. Only she can make our surroundings live and
nourish us.
'Beyond the need for bread, a woman's needs are two; deeper than all
cravings save the mother's passion, firm-rooted in our endless past, is
the heart-hunger. The trees that sweep my chimney have their roots at
the world's core! The flowers in my dooryard have grown there for a
thousand years! What millenniums have done, shall decades undo? We are
not so shallow, so plastic as that! We will go into the mills, the
shops, the offices, if we must, but we know we are off the track of
life. Neither our desire nor our power is there.
'I have talked glibly enough about restricting superfluous possessions
for the sake of developing a finer quality in those we have; I have said
only personality gives that quality to our surroundings--but I have not
said the final thing. It is this: I believe that in the humble business
of loving the material things that are given to us to own and love, in
shaping our homes around them, in making them vital and therefore
beautiful, so that they serve our spirits in their turn, we are not only
making the most of our resources in this life, but are doing more than
that. Somehow, I cannot tell you how, I know that we are _getting them
across_--into the timeless places! In making them vital we are making
them enduring.
'Christ tells us to lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven. What did
that mean to you when you were young? I thought it meant a procession of
self-denials and charities, more or less lifeless because the offering
was made slightly against the grain! I had no idea that when I loved
somebody very much or pitied somebody very much, when I shared my heart
or shared my roof eagerly, that I was doing the commanded thing. Still
less did I realize, when I worked hard to make my home more comfortable
or more beautiful, that I was sending vibrations from my everyday world
right into the eternal one--every deed an actual hammer stroke on my
house not made with hands. But so sure as that our mortal shall put on
immortality, I now hold it that what we first find in the eternal world
will be the things into which we have unstintingly flung our vitality,
our _feeling_, while we are briefly here.
'_Here we have no continuing city_. But when I am making my house live,
I and no other, putting into it as I best may something of the serenity
of Athens and the sacredness of Jerusalem and the beauty of Siena, then
it is taking its place beside my greater loves. Then I am creating a
home, not only in this world, but in the next. I have put something over
into the eternal world that fire cannot burn, nor floods destroy, nor
moth and rust corrupt. It is safe, even from myself, forever! No Heaven
can be holy to me if I have not made this spot holy. I shall not ask,
even from the mercy of the Merciful, a heavenly mansion if I have failed
to make this earthly dwelling live. Eternity begins beside my hearth,
shaped by my will. A woman knows!'
Reminiscence with Postscript
By Owen Wister
I
Not alone because of their good meat and drink are three meals shrined
at the heart of these following impressions. Singly, each one did
delightfully engage the palate, but the three together speak appealingly
to sentiment. It is of a great house, a little inn, and of the fair
region round about them that I shall mainly discourse--and whether I do
or don't give a final _x_ to the name of the house, there are people and
documents to say I have spelt it wrong: which comes very near to saying
that both ways are right. The _x_ shall remain, the majority seems to
favor it, and I at once beg that you share my relish of these posturing
Renaissance lines, written by royal command in honor of Chenonceaux:--
Au saint bal des dryades,
A Phoebus, ce grand dieu,
Aux humides nayades
J'ai consacré ce lieu.
This highly plaster-cast lyric was recited during the 'triomphe' held at
Chenonceaux to celebrate the arrival there of François II and Mary
Stuart. The hostess was as distinguished as her visitors; and never,
before I went to Chenonceaux, did I associate naiads and dryads and
poems of welcome with Catherine de'Medici. But we must allow this
monstrous personage an eye for good houses. She preferred Chenonceaux to
all her dwellings--she preferred it so much, indeed, that she made
another lady get out of it, exchanging for it the decidedly inferior
residence of Chaumont. And we have Catherine to thank (I fear) for the
strangely felicitous fancy that placed upon the arches built from the
rear of the house to the farther side of the river by her rejected
predecessor, Diane de Poitiers, that enchanting hall or gallery, which
rises three stories high, if you count the nine windows in the steeply
and gracefully pitched slate roof.
Basti si magnifiquement
Il est debout, comme un géant,
Dedans le lit de la rivière,
C'est-a-dire dessus un pont
Qui porte cent toises de long.
These verses bump down heavily upon the bridge, and, despite their
scrupulous statistics as to its length, they scarcely measure the
excellence of Chenonceaux, but rather the gap between French verse and
French architecture in the sixteenth century. Villon could have come
nearer the mark; but Villon was long gone before the ancient mill on the
river Cher was transfigured by its purchaser into the château he did not
live to complete. 'S'il vient à point' said Thomas Bohier, and he graved
it in many ornamental places of his edifice, 'me souviendra.'
And here am I writing his name and thinking about him, three hundred and
ninety-two years after his death. What a pleasant reason for being
remembered! What a quietly illustrious introduction to posterity: the
originator of the mansion whose sheer beauty brought a succession of
kings and queens and other great people to sojourn in it, whose walls
have listened to the blandishments of François I, the sallies of
Fontenelle and Voltaire, the sentimentalities of Rousseau. Do their
ghosts walk here upon these terraces? Do they meet in the long gallery
over the Cher? If they don't, they are less wise in the next world than
they were in this. Almost might one envy some figure in a well-preserved
piece of tapestry, hanging in any hall or chamber here and commanding a
view out of any window that looked up or down the placid river.
Embroidered thus for ever, amid high company, ladies and gentlemen of
importance with hawks and feathers and armor and steeds richly
caparisoned, ministered to by esquires and serfs, one would exist
admired, valued, and carefully dusted. Daily sight-seers from all lands
would be conducted into one's presence (Sundays included, 10-11 A.M.,
2-6 P.M.), thus animating one's feudal leisure with sufficient variety.
There one would be, an acknowledged masterpiece, for ever aloof from the
unstable present, nevermore driven to enlist against the restless evils
of the world. The trouble is, somebody from Pittsburg might buy one. Now
I could no more brook living as tapestry in America than I could live as
an American in Europe, expatriated and trivially evaporating amid
beauties and comforts that were none of my native heritage.
Do you know the country where Chenonceaux stands? Do you know the river?
Have you ever gone there from Tours, or come there the opposite way,
from Bourges through Vierzon and Montrichard?
The region shares a secret with certain rare people, whom all of us are
glad to count among our acquaintance. Certain men and women, immediately
on our first meeting them, make us desire to meet them again; not
because they have uttered remarkable thoughts or reminded us of Venus or
Apollo: perhaps they have said nothing that you and I couldn't say, and
we may know people much better looking. But they radiate--what is it
that they radiate? We feel it, we bask in it, it flows over us. It isn't
sunlight or moonlight, but a fairy-light of their own. When these
shining creatures come into the room, happiness enters with them. How do
they do it? It gets us nowhere to say that there is 'something' in the
tone of their voice, or 'something' in the look of their eyes: what is
the something? I'm glad I don't know; mystery is growing so scarce, that
I am thankful for anything which cannot be explained.